An unsung hero

摘要

WITH the world's attention on vaccines, now feels like a good moment to sing the praises of an often forgotten contributor to their development. Three hundred years ago this month, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu got her daughter inoculated against smallpox with a technique that was unfamiliar to people in Britain at the time - making her child the first person in the West to be protected in this way. Without Montagu's willingness to adopt a practice she had learned from other cultures, the introduction of vaccines around 80 years later would never have taken place.